Hurry Up Cake
3/4 cupful sugar 1½ cupfuls flour. 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract Milk ½ teaspoonful lemon extract 2 whites of eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into bowl. Put whites of eggs into measuring cup, add Crisco, and fill cup with milk. Add to dry mixture with extracts and beat vigorously six minutes. Pour into small Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven forty-five minutes. Cake may be frosted if liked.
Sufficient for one small cake.
Cakes 3 eggs 1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt
The text as printed is incomplete: flour and sugar appear in the method but not in the ingredient list, and a stray fragment from the following page ("Cakes 3 eggs 1 cupful sugar...") has been swept in at the end. What survives is a one-cup shortcut white cake, and the technique is worth understanding even where the quantities have been lost.
- Missing quantitiesNo amount of flour or sugar is given, and no reliable figure can be reconstructed from the page. A cake of this size would take somewhere in the region of 1½ cups flour and close to a cup of sugar, but that is guesswork, not what the page says.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold since 1911 and reformulated in the late 2000s to remove trans fats. Current Crisco behaves much the same in a cake batter; 4 tablespoonfuls is ¼ cup. "Criscoed" simply means greased with it.
- The measuring-cup trickThis is the hinge of the recipe. Egg whites go into the measuring cup, the shortening is added on top, and milk is poured in until the cup is full — so the total volume is fixed and the milk quantity varies with how much room the whites and fat take up. The cup size is not stated, though a standard one-cup measure is the obvious reading. Do not measure the milk separately.
- Beat vigorously six minutesSix minutes is a long time by modern standards and probably assumes hand beating. With a stand mixer, less time will bring the batter to the same smooth, aerated state, and prolonged beating risks a tougher crumb.
- Moderate oven350°F. Forty-five minutes is long for a small cake at that heat — start testing at 30 minutes with a skewer.
- Small cake tinThe book says only 'one small cake'; a single small round or loaf tin is the likely intention, giving one layer rather than two.
- Two extractsAlmond and lemon together are a common pairing in white cakes of this kind. The 1½ teaspoonfuls of lemon is assertive by modern taste; a teaspoon is plenty.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, odourless, shelf-stable solid. The recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil, a working cookery author, and the book's job was to prove that Crisco could replace butter in cakes, lard in pastry and both in frying — hence the brand name appearing in nearly every line, and the verb "Criscoed" for greasing a tin. "Hurry up" cakes belong to a genre that flourished with reliable chemical baking powder: no creaming stage, no separate mixing of wet and dry, everything beaten together in one bowl. The one-cup measuring trick here is a small piece of domestic-science thinking of the sort that filled early twentieth-century manufacturers' cookbooks, where the aim was a result the least experienced cook could not easily spoil.